Light-Front Holography, Light-Front Wavefunctions, and Novel QCD Phenomena

Abstract

Light-front holography is one of the most remarkable features of the AdS/CFT correspondence. In spite of its present limitations, it provides important physical insights into the non-perturbative regime of QCD and its transition to the perturbative domain. This novel framework allows hadronic amplitudes in a higher dimensional anti-de Sitter (AdS) space to be mapped to frame-independent light-front wavefunctions of hadrons in physical space–time. The model leads to an effective confining light-front QCD Hamiltonian and a single-variable light-front Schrödinger equation which determines the eigenspectrum and the light-front wavefunctions of hadrons for general spin and orbital angular momentum. The coordinate z in AdS space is uniquely identified with a Lorentz-invariant coordinate ζ which measures the separation of the constituents within a hadron at equal light-front time and determines the off-shell dynamics of the bound-state wavefunctions, and thus the fall-off as a function of the invariant mass of the constituents. The soft-wall holographic model modified by a positive-sign dilaton metric, leads to a remarkable one-parameter description of nonperturbative hadron dynamics—a semi-classical frame-independent first approximation to the spectra and light-front wavefunctions of meson and baryons. The model predicts a Regge spectrum of linear trajectories with the same slope in the leading orbital angular momentum L of hadrons and the radial quantum number n. The hadron eigensolutions projected on the free Fock basis provides the complete set of valence and non-valence light-front Fock state wavefunctions \({\Psi_{n/H}(x_i, {\mathbf{k}_{\perp{i}}}, \lambda_i)}\) which describe the hadron’s momentum and spin distributions needed to compute the direct measures of hadron structure at the quark and gluon level, such as elastic and transition form factors, distribution amplitudes, structure functions, generalized parton distributions and transverse momentum distributions. The effective confining potential also creates quark–antiquark pairs from the amplitude \({q \to {q}\bar{q}{q}}\) . Thus in holographic QCD higher Fock states can have any number of extra \({q{\bar{q}}}\) pairs. We discuss the relevance of higher Fock-states for describing the detailed structure of space and time-like form factors. The AdS/QCD model can be systematically improved by using its complete orthonormal solutions to diagonalize the full QCD light-front Hamiltonian or by applying the Lippmann–Schwinger method in order to systematically include the QCD interaction terms. A new perspective on quark and gluon condensates is also obtained.